Better and better: Verraco is perfecting his recipe for impactful club music

In JP López’s base of Medellín, the word ‘verraco’, often used interchangeably with ‘berraco’, has several different slang meanings depending on the context in which it’s employed. Two of its more positive interpretations, though, describe a person who displays great talent, or is significantly determined. Following a whirlwind 12 months that have seen López release standout EPs on Voam – featuring 2023 summer anthem ‘Escándaloo’ – and Timedance, and continue to establish the TraTraTrax label that he co-runs with friends Nicolás Sánchez (Nyksan) and Daniel Uribe (DJ Lomalinda) as a dominant global club music force, it’s hard to argue that he’s not living up to the connotations of his chosen moniker.

López’s journey as Verraco fully began in 2017 with the founding of the Insurgentes imprint he ran with Uribe, and his decision to quit pursuing music journalism following the completion of his university studies in Bogotá. “After going to university and doing journalism for four years, my learning curve really stopped progressing,” López says of that choice on a call from his home in Medellín. “I had never stopped making music, but my energy and focus was on my work. I owe a lot to my journalism work because, despite not having mentors in music, I did have them in journalism. The mentors I had there gave me the tools to better understand my identity, which set me up to better conceptualise projects like Insurgentes and my work as Verraco.”

First on Insurgentes came three EPs of analogue techno and electro ('Resistir', 'New Army of Androgynes' and 'Don't Kill'em All') – music that López describes now as sounding “very naïve”, despite remaining proud of some of it still – before the label cast its net wider to put out records from fellow South American artists such as Argentinian Seph and Chilean Tomás Urquieta, as well as López’s debut album, the IDM-influenced ‘Grial’, in 2020. “It wasn’t until ‘Grial’ that I started to shape my sound palette and identity,” he says. “Maybe I should have waited longer to work all of that out. Speaking retrospectively, I would prefer that it was my first release, but sometimes you have to make mistakes to evolve and learn.”

The past year or so has seen López undergo a crucial shift in his approach to producing electronic music, with the aforementioned ‘Escándaloo’ the ultimate turning point. Though he was buoyed by the positive press reception for ‘Grial’ upon its release, as well as praise from peers and inspirations alike, he soon found himself wanting more from his productions as his DJ bookings and travels to Europe especially began to pick up more and more.

“I felt that becoming a better and more confident DJ helped me to understand more how to sequence and arrange club music,” López says of the change in approach that has led up to his latest more dancefloor-focused output. “When I was sitting here in my bedroom studio before, I would start to make a 4x4 track, get two minutes into it, and decide this is bullshit; it’s too basic.” He notes that there was a particular irony to this outlook as someone who largely considered himself a ‘techno’ DJ just as likely to play a hardgroove record from the early ‘00s, or a hypnotic club stomper by Mike Parker, as he was something more broken or rhythmically complex from the Timedance camp.

It was a message in November 2022 from Arthur Cayzer, better known as Pariah and the co-founder of Voam, that set López on the path to shaking off his hangups on making ‘simpler’ 4x4 club music once and for all. Cayzer had written to tell him of his appreciation for López’s track ‘Ronaldinho hace la elástica’, which appeared on the TraTraTrax compilation ‘no pare, sigue sigue’. A restrained but effective club cut that largely foregoes the established payoff of any kind of kick drum-driven ‘drop’, it was López’s attempt to make, as he describes it, “weightless hardgroove”, influenced equally by the beatless rhythm tracks of Barker and Mumdance & Logos’ Different Circles label that had become a fixture of his DJ sets, and the funky techno he’d been listening to and playing for years.

“Arthur said it was one of his favourite tracks of the year,” López recalls. “Voam, for me, was one of the few labels that I thought if I do something for the club, it would be a perfect fit, because its releases mix interesting sound design with timeless techno.” It gave him the motivation to knuckle down on some initial ideas that became ‘Escándaloo’ and pass the demo on to Cayzer.

A synapse-twitching slice of bouncy techno built around whirring synths and shuffling dembow-ish rhythms, the track ultimately gives way to a riotous tide of kicks that did the damage in summer 2023 from Dekmantel to Dimensions – I personally heard it at least five times in one weekend at the former. It’s a perfect example of the kind of hybrid club music López had found himself wanting to explore: bringing together the mind-bending sound design of modern broken techno, the driving drums of his favourite 4x4 groovers, and the unique flavour of the various sounds from the Latinx diaspora that he and his friends had grown up listening to in Colombia.

“Aside from the forward-thinking production choices, it has this kind of unhinged catchiness to it that really appeals to both myself and Jamie [Roberts, AKA Blawan],” Cayzer tells me of ‘Escándaloo’ over email. “When JP first sent the track, we immediately felt that it was a perfect fit for Voam.” Within just weeks of sending that demo, the full EP – rounded out by the punchy drums and spicy sound design tricks of ‘jajaja’, and emo synths of ‘How is this even possible?’ – was sent for mastering, the quickest turnaround for any record Voam has put out, Cayzer points out.

“It feels special for that to happen because Voam is a label that doesn’t release many records,” López says. “They are super picky, in a good way. It was also very special because it was an opportunity to get to know people on a more personal level, and see that those who you were looking up to for many years can become your friends and contemporaries.”

Community and building connections through music are clearly very important principles to López. The founding of TraTraTrax in 2020 alongside two of his best friends has provided him with an outlet to showcase the productions of a network of exciting, envelope-pushing talent from across Latin America, taking in releases from Medellín-based artists such as DJ Pai and OCTUBRXLIBRV; Bogotá-born Bitter Babe; and Entrañas and Nicola Cruz from Ecuador, among many others.

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The inclusion of remixes on each release has also built bridges between these artists and a variety of global club music producers, covering numerous styles and tempos – take Pearson Sound turning in an anthemic rework of Nick León and Venezuelan raptor house pioneer DJ Babatr’s already rousing banger ‘Xtasis’, or Perko putting a dub techno spin on Colombian-Swiss producer Luca Durán’s sultry, bass-heavy cut ‘Ojos Cerrados’. “Myself, Daniel and Nicolás have a wide spectrum of tastes – we will happily go between attending reggaetón parties and seeing, I don’t know, Mike Parker somewhere else,” López says. “Commissioning the remixes feels like an additional way to present all of those tastes on the label.”

With increased exposure and press attention for TraTraTrax, though, have come some of the negative trappings of success as Western journalists and fans alike seek tidy reductive terms, most notably in this case ‘Latin club’, to describe the label’s sound. It’s a matter that López, along with his fellow label founders, has playfully pushed back against a number of times already before, so he’s understandably keen now to look past the debates around it all. “We’re just focused on the next move,” he says. “It’s good to occasionally stop and reflect, embrace the praise, but we have so many other ideas ahead of us. Our focus is on being consistent and believing in what we’re doing.”

Amid an increasingly busy touring schedule in his own right, López has had the chance to take TraTraTrax on the road in recent years alongside other figures affiliated with the label. When asked if there have been any particular milestones for him in the growth of the imprint, he points immediately to the moments he gets to share with friends, touring and playing festivals with them. “Around six or seven years ago when we were hustling with Laura [Solarte, AKA Bitter Babe], for example, this all seemed so far away,” he says. “Now being on the other side, surfing the wave, it’s an amazing feeling. Breaking through with your friends is everything.”

With a fresh vigour for making what he calls “impactful club music” – so much so that occasional work on a more conceptual second album has been put on pause for now – López isn’t looking back. “I enjoy making these kinds of tracks, where there are big hooks or super dramatic melodies, but there is also a more experimental side to them where they can make you feel uncomfortable and be very intense,” he says. His most recent EP, May’s Timedance-released ‘Breathe… Godspeed’, runs the full gamut of those qualities.

‘0∞’ and ‘Godspeed ’ retain the buzzing, maximalist basslines of ‘Escándaloo’, weaving in myriad sound design quirks and, on the former, a dancefloor-confounding dubstep ‘moment’. Over on the B-side, proceedings get considerably wonkier on the halftime stepper ‘Climaxing | Breathe’, while López flexes his melodic chops in the gorgeously saccharine melodies of closer ‘Sí, idealízame’ – one of those perfectly stirring cuts built for 4:AM tears-in-the-club episodes.

The EP came about after López met Timedance founder Batu face-to-face for the first time at the 2023 edition of Dutch festival Draaimolen. Much like Pariah, Batu had been playing ‘Ronaldinho hace la elástica’ in a lot of his DJ sets, and had previously reached out online to hear some demos – he had also delivered a scorching remix of Brazilian artist BADSISTA’s track ‘VEM PRA ZONA LESTE’ for TraTraTrax in the months prior to their IRL meeting. Plans to put something together for Timedance were floated and López returned to Medellín to get to work on what would become the record’s four tracks. “This felt like a beautiful, huge opportunity because I love Timedance and Omar’s [McCutcheon, AKA Batu] DJing, so I wanted to produce something that made sense for the label, but also push that further,” he says. “I think that EP is where I consolidated all of the ingredients of my sound: UK soundsystem culture and bass music; IDM-ish sound design; dembow; techno reminiscence. After doing that, I’ve been more confident of what my ‘sound’ is.”

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There’s an endearingly wide-eyed quality to the way López speaks about the friendships and associations he’s made in recent years, be it via his solo work, TraTraTrax, or his foray into bringing international guests to Medellín and Bogotá over the past year to play at his Escándaloo parties. 2024 events have seen him welcome the likes of Ben UFO, Batu, livwutang, Anthony Naples, TSVI and ISAbella, among others, to Colombia to share line-up space with local figures such as Julianna, WOST and Merino. With plenty already on his plate though – “being in the studio, touring, running TraTraTrax” and helping out with the operations of a small club in Medellín – he’s not quite up for taking on the “big promoter” mantle.

“I need time to step back and reflect, do some reading,” López says. “That’s one of the most important things for me at the moment, to slow down and focus my energy on realising certain projects. I need more time for myself, and I want to be in the studio more. I want to see friends more and just contemplate life if that makes sense. I want to be able to stop and read to take in new information, or just reflect and be inspired by life, because that feeds into my production.”

Admitting he’s probably been close to burnout before, López says he’s too much of a “workaholic”, however, to fully take a step back. “I’m always in a competition with myself rather than other people. I’m trying to achieve excellence by just repeating one task, like production, but my aim is to do that better and better. That’s my gasoline.”

‘Breathe... Godspeed’ is out now via Timedance, get it here

Christian Eede is News Editor at The Quietus and a freelance writer, follow him on Twitter